It's hard to imagine Saul Williams as anything other than the galaxy-hopping amethyst rock star who arrived on the planet fully formed at the tail end of the last millennium. Had to be a hellified glitch in the matrix. There's no other way to explain how a modern-day mystic broke through, spitting the gift while channeling something sacred and deftly sociocritical.
My first time seeing him perform live was in a small Atlanta cafe. Probably around 1999. Slam, the indie flick he'd co-written and starred in, had just racked up both Sundance's Grand Jury Prize and the Caméra d'Or at Cannes the year before. When he took the stage that night, he immediately asked for all the lights to be shut off, his silhouette barely discernible in the pitch blackness. The only thing left to illuminate his visage, while sha-clack-clackin' his way through the post-apocalypse, was the annoying flash from the camera of this student photographer kneeling down front.
I must've shot through five rolls of film that night. But nothing captured the coming of Saul Williams better than his own prophetic flows.
Now, nearly 30 years later, Williams is turning his focus toward the process of becoming — both his and, potentially, ours. Following his recent onscreen role in the Oscar-winning blockbuster Sinners and his Grammy-nominated spoken word LP Saul Williams Meets Carlos Niño & Friends At Treepeople, the multidisciplinary poet, actor and musician is releasing an album, Leap Life, and book, Songs My Mother Taught Me: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, this fall. Both came as a result of Williams making "a conscious decision that it was time to shift gears," he tells me via Zoom. After using social media to vocally advocate for Palestinian freedom in recent years, "I was tired of putting all of my thoughts into captions. I'm not an influencer. My strong point is actually music, poetry, performance. That's my bag."
The resulting book is the simplest, most straightforward prose of his career. A demystification of the mystic himself, he tells the story of his own radicalization and how it came to be — guided not by anger, rage or bitterness but by love, adventure and curiosity. The album, in turn, might be his most enchanting. Leap Life is both a figurative and literal expression of our eternal connection to the ancestral plane, a ceremonial guided meditation meant to reconnect us to our most enduring strength and power. Us, here, could apply specifically to the indigenous peoples and descendants of American slavery. But, more broadly, the message is for all of us living — as Williams frequently reminds throughout Songs — under empire.
Though it wasn't the plan, it happened serendipitously that both projects are coming out within weeks of each other. Taken together, Williams' stirring portrait of evolution — from the precocious son of activist parents who was raised in a drafty, old 27-room house in Newburgh, N.Y. — becomes a perfect catalyst for making art that functions primarily and passionately as a tool of resistance. Against racial capitalism. Against fascism and imperialism. Against the American project itself.
As for his own evolution, it turns out that the last 30 years required him to become something even he didn't foresee: an "investigative poet." When we talked, two weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a speech that recalled the rhetoric of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Williams was completely open-hearted and uncynical. We discussed everything from the propagandizing machine of the West to Jay-Z's thin-skinned response to public criticism. Wherever I mentioned the threat of danger, he saw the potential for a better future. Not built on any false hope, but something much more grounded in the land and the people.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rodney Carmichael: Leap Life isn't a collection of songs as much as it is a conjuring. It feels like you're channeling the voice of the ancestors on this one. What is it that you — or they, by proxy — want us to tap into? And, why does it feel like now is the time?
Saul Williams: Well, I believe that we're living through a crucial moment, not just in our history as Black people or in global history. We are at a point of confrontation and a point when things must turn. Part of that turn relies on us and how awakened we are to the moment. And, of course, the points of seduction, distraction, indoctrination are all there to make it where we choose to think that maybe this is something we could sit out. But I don't believe that it is. I think we have to call on our greatest and innermost selves in order to make it through this moment.
Someone asked me yesterday: "Do you think things get worse before they get better?" I was like, "Yes, certainly." We make it worse by thinking that maybe what's happening "over there" doesn't apply to us. We make the battle longer, more difficult by being short-sighted and losing that sense of solidarity — whether that's with migrants within the confines of our border or whether that's with the victims of American imperialism. It's also a turning point because we're learning so much. And looking at the state of the world now, all I can say is I am not rooting for the U.S. to win.
The book Songs My Mother Taught Me is such a great companion piece to the album. You really do such a good job of unmasking imperialism in it. And by the end, you turn that mask into a mirror and show us how we're all complicit, like you say, living in the core of empire. Was there a moment of unveiling for you, when you came to understand the role you've played in it?
I don't even know if it's my understanding that grew or just my ability to articulate what I understood that developed over time. But in terms of that unveiling, I would say the most startling moment has been the last three years. Because that's the moment when I realized that there were even people within my circle — people who had been in my personal and intimate space, people who had sat at my dinner table, who had championed my work, published my work — who I thought shared a perspective on how we saw the world. And I learned that those people were willing to embrace a level of hypocrisy that just seemed so glaring to me.
I'm speaking primarily in relationship to Palestine, with a particular bent on liberalism [and] those who have said that they were allies. But then some are like, "Oh, I am very progressive within our borders." That's pretty much the role of the Democrats. The Democrats and Republicans may have their differences within the borders, but outside of the borders they share the same idea of the role of America — whether in West Asia or on the continent of Africa or in Haiti. It's disheartening and I can't say that I did not understand that before, but I will say that there were elements of it that I just had not paid close enough attention to. That unveiling had a lot of intimate repercussions, because there are people who will never enter my personal space again [and] I will not be speaking to again.
You're really talking about the importance of artists choosing a side. That's the theme of your book and a quote that you got from Paul Robeson, who you sort of dedicated your life to studying at a very young age. I'm wondering how your intimate knowledge of his story — especially him being blacklisted during the Red Scare — has prepared you for the last few years where your outspokenness about Israel's attacks on Palestinians may have ostracized you to some degree?
I don't know if I'll call it a fear but my premonition is that the worst is yet to come. Just 10 days ago, Rubio was saying people who identify as anti-capitalists [and] anti-fascists will be labeled as domestic terrorists. [Editor's note: In his speech on July 17, Rubio said the U.S. was going after groups the State Department had previously designated far-left terrorist groups. He said radical leftists adopt a variety of labels, including "anti-capitalist."] According to my beliefs — because I definitely identify as anti-capitalist and anti-fascist — I am already a domestic terrorist according to that. And I see the game they're playing. When you think of the numbers of people who had their passports stripped from them in the '50s and the sort of political repression that occurred then, things have not changed.
So, I do think that that, yes, being familiar with Robeson all this time definitely helped me in terms of awareness and preparedness for the sort of things that could come. Like when I learned of Trump's relationship to Roy Cohn. Most people make that Roy Cohn connection with [the play] Angels in America. But Roy Cohn's connection to [former U.S. senator Joseph] McCarthy is crazy. He's right there signaling [McCarthy] and finding ways to blacklist and take artists and activists down. And this [was] the mentor of our current president. These are not things that I only started feeling with Trump. It's just been accelerating. But it's a door that Democrats opened up with Biden.
I want to go back to your earlier development because Songs My Mother Taught Me is the story of your radicalization and how it was fueled as you came of age. And I think the interesting thing is it doesn't come by anger or rage or bitterness, but it's fueled by love and adventure and curiosity. How hard has it been to sustain that outlook on the world as your understanding of exactly what you're up against has grown over time?
Not difficult at all. One thing is, I really like people. I like observing people. I like learning from and with people. And I would say that overall people are genuinely kind. There are points of indoctrination and rigidity that you find in people. There's a time and place for confrontation and there's a time and place to just let it pass you by. But overall, my issues are with power and with people's relationship to power. How power corrupts the individual. Or how individuals yearn for proximity to power. Or the sort of behavior that they assign to power that they think is acceptable because of power. And even that is something most of us can all observe together and try to make sense of.
On the song "The Dagger," you declare that "music is the weapon." And in reading your book, it becomes really clear that a large part of our music — especially hip-hop — has been weaponized against us as Black folk. So how do artists "make songs that crumble empires," as you write, when the means of expression has been so thoroughly co-opted?
I don't know if it's the song that crumbles empires. The song has a potential to crumble whatever has been built inside of the individual, so that they can break down whatever barriers are there. So that then they can be mobilized to participate with a growing community in crumbling that empire. There are songs that I love that have served me in my journey and growth. But I can't point to a song and say, historically, once that song was written that empire was over. Fela Kuti has extraordinary revolutionary music. But there is still a lot of work to do in Nigeria. There is a whole new genre born of Fela's music — Afrobeat[s] – and you almost feel like people took the rhythm without taking the message.
I listen to music on a regular basis. And I will periodically hear songs that inspire me on a level more than a dope beat. There are some songs that make you go, Whoa, this song is saying something. Of course, it's a rarer and rarer occasion with pop music. But I think those things happen in cycles. I was there to be a part of that spark of a new cycle of popularity in revolutionary poetry. But it's not the first and only time it happened. It happened 20 years before in the Black Arts Movement. It happened 20 years before that with the Beatnik movement. It happened 20 years before that with the Harlem Renaissance movement. So maybe the math is just, it happens every 20 years.
I think it's similar with music. There's energy in the music between '68 and '72, for example, in terms of music that's coming out of our community. A great deal of it is responding to the idea of Black power. And it's true that the role of COINTELPRO — and the way that Black power was co-opted into meaning Black capitalism — spilled into the music. There's no denying that there are a lot of people really confused about whether it's even possible to have a society that's not capitalist. That's when we talk about those points of indoctrination and how thorough it is. Music's job, then, becomes about are there any shortcuts to unraveling that? Because what does music do? It harmonizes. We can harmonize an entire stadium, an entire audience. And when that music has a message — a message that is more than I don't like you if you're broke or Your a** is perfect — there's a chance that [we can open that] magical door. That's what I'm looking for through art: Are there any life hacks that could occur if we make the right song? If we all get into it, can it push us to withhold our labor for a week? Can we all maybe spend a month working on that song? How do we inspire artists to be excited about making songs that contribute to our overall progression as human beings, as a society, as a people?
So is it time to throw hip-hop out with the bathwater, so to speak? Can we take it back? Is it time to birth something else?
Those things don't happen by choice. Those things happen inevitably. Hip-hop is not about to be thrown out with the bathwater. Maybe what we can throw out with the bathwater is our conception of what a hero is and what a hero isn't.
Look at the recent celebration surrounding Jay-Z.
[Laughs] If you weren't gonna say it, I was gonna say it.
Reasonable Doubt came out in 1996. I was alive in 1996. I lived in New York in 1996. I lived in Brooklyn in 1996. And you can look at the charts. What was the album of 1996 that deserves the biggest celebration ever? It's The Score. There's no doubt that this person has had a huge influence on society. But we can question what that influence is, [especially] when we talk about our confusion about capitalism and all of these things.
But the level of influence of Lauryn Hill and the Fugees from 1996 is great. So what are we doing here? It's not even a whitewashing of history; it's like a money-washing of history. It's dangerous. And I always felt that way with Jay-Z. I feel like I'd like him as a person. I shook his hand once when he walked up to me and said what's up, but I've never had a conversation with him. He always seemed like dudes I went to high school with. I remember when n***** in the hood would dress like they played tennis. Literally, they'd wear fresh white Diadoras and a white headband. And there were other n*****, like me, who were really into dancing. We had a different type of swag. And we were cool with those cats, but, to me, those cats were always kind of conservative. They always had caesars. They sold [dope]. Which is cool; I have no judgment about that. But the thing that gets me is when I pair that up against an Andre 3000. I've just always been way more interested in the crazy cat than the conservative cat.
There was a time [in 2019] when I had posted an email from Jay-Z. I was on The Breakfast Club in 2014 when I was doing [the Tupac-inspired stageplay] Holler if You Hear Me. I wasn't supposed to be on, but I bullied my way on. I waited for Charlamagne [tha God] in the parking lot. Seriously, I was doing that play; I had some type of Pac energy in me. So in that interview, I referenced the moment in a Jay-Z song ["Moment of Clarity"] where he was like, 'I can't help the poor if I'm one of them.'
And I just said, 'Thank god Harriet Tubman didn't think that way.'
Yes, I remember this interview.
So you remember this? Try to find it. It's not online anymore.
The Breakfast Club took the whole interview down?
This is the story I'm telling you. Maybe a couple of months or a year after it came out and went viral, I got an email. Charlamagne had forwarded it from Jay-Z, but Jay-Z's email [address] was blacked out. I don't know if that was by directive or if it was Charlamagne's choice. But this email was like, We both have a certain standing in the community, and we shouldn't be seen judging each other or criticizing each other in public. If his email address was there, that would have been a new moment in history because I would have written him privately and begun a dialogue.
[NPR has reached out to representatives of Jay-Z for comment.]
A large part of what you are talking about now, and in the book, is this obsession with power and wealth. You point out the privileges even those of us without wealth enjoy by living within the empire — from comfort and apathy to lethargy and obliviousness. Your great-grandmother emigrated to America from Haiti through Ellis Island in 1917, yet you are very clear-minded about not being invested in the American project. What do you think would happen if Black America en masse stopped fighting and dying to hold this country up to its democratic ideals as it always has? Because I think the fear is that the country would fall apart — and we'd fall apart with it.
There's a book that I read called Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. It's speculative fiction and in this book they talk about how war in Iran triggers something larger that leads to the falling apart of the U.S. military and thus the U.S. empire. It came out in 2022; very interesting book. Octavia [Butler] didn't get to finish her Parable trilogy — I would see this as the third book. When everyone talks about those two, I'm like, read this next.
America has never been democratic if we consider indigenous sovereignty — whether that's on Turtle Island, or in Puerto Rico, in Hawaii, in Haiti, in Congo, Palestine. If we were to follow through with the process of challenging ourselves and the institutions as they exist, perhaps it would bring us closer to the principles of democracy that we dream of. There are things that we thought we'd see in our lifetime. For some people, it's flying cars. But there are others who thought we'd be a step closer toward Medicare for all or free education. And for a lot of Americans these are things that will never happen.
There are tons of places where this happens regularly. I'm in England right now. I just got back from France. It's also the case in Iran. When we go to the places that the U.S. has recently been attacking — like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba — these are all places that have higher literacy rates than the U.S. In double digits! And by literacy rates, I don't mean these people can read. I mean that they have the ability to discern propaganda when they hear it, to know when they're being lied to and to read between the lines. They don't fall for the same stuff that our grandparents fall for on Facebook. Or, that we fall for when they tell us that anti-colonial resistance is terrorism.
The thing that I would love to see, first of all, has everything to do with land back. That's why I start with indigenous sovereignty because that's how we solve the ecological question. The indigenous communities have always had the answers of how we need to be interacting with the land. We just ignored them and said they were primitive. And then after hundreds of years, we go, Maybe they had a good idea there.
I do believe that this idea of Western civilization is really just rooted in Black death and indigenous erasure. It's rooted in genocide. And I am not afraid to experiment to see where we land. Danger is at hand. But the idea of collapse from the inside — the role that we can play — that is not the danger. That is only a danger to the capitalist core of this country. We would find ways to feed each other, support each other and create better relationships between each other. Better schools. Better systems. I would just like to see us outlive our hypocrisies. It doesn't mean that we would not develop new ones. But the tried and true ones that we've seen for so long, it's just a bit tired.
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